For the first time, SNOMED International, as part of the April 2025 Business Meetings in Oslo, is hosting a full day of presentations and discussions focused on Norway. To be held on April 10, SNOMED CT in Norway Day will offer 10 sessions highlighting SNOMED CT use and initiatives in Norway and more broadly in Europe. The event builds on the SNOMED CT in Europe day held in 2024 in Belgium and is free to attend, whether onsite or online.
In this blog, Marte Rime Bø, Senior Advisor for Terminology at the Norwegian Directorate of Health, discusses the goal of the day’s events, what attendees can expect to learn and why you should consider attending.
Q: Why are we hosting a day focused on SNOMED CT in Norway specifically?
A: We thought this was a very good opportunity to share with the SNOMED International community some concrete business cases from Norway. It’s also a great opportunity for our collaborating organizations, including health regions, hospitals, municipalities, vendors and professional clinical organizations, to get together and learn about what’s happening with SNOMED CT in Norway and internationally as well.
Q: How is the day set up?
A: There are 10 sessions highlighting SNOMED CT use and initiatives: the seven morning sessions are focused on Norway, while the three afternoon sessions feature international presenters discussing the European Health Data Space, ICD-11 and artificial intelligence. The day includes a keynote on dental health and big data, as well as presentations on topics such as using screening for intestinal and prostate cancers, alerts for medication prescriptions, and standardized care plans for nursing. Hopefully, it's both broad enough and specific enough to be interesting for our international visitors. We're trying to keep it very grounded! That’s also why we’re having all the sessions in English, rather than Norwegian. Luckily, most Norwegians know English!
Q: What are the roles of the Norwegian Directorate of Health and the Norway National Release Centre in the event?
A: The Directorate of Health runs the National Release Centre (NRC), which is responsible for the national licensing and use of SNOMED CT in Norway. The NRC maintains and distributes the Norwegian extension of SNOMED CT, and functions as a national support centre. The Directorate of Health, which will manage the event and provide context for the presentations, is responsible for a number of different areas – some people work with the registries and some with the medications or nursing module; we also think some of the people in other departments of the Directorate of Health who work with standardization, architecture, code systems, terminology, international collaboration and registries will be interested, so we have engaged that expertise to participate.
Q: What will be the focus of the keynote on dental health and big data?
A: This session is going to be really interesting. Jørn André Jørgensen, who is giving this keynote, is an Advisor, Electronic Patient Record, and Digital Development, Vestfold County Municipality. Also a dentist, he is going to talk about the multiple decades of dental data the municipality has collected – all of which is SNOMED CT-coded and structured. That includes every part of the tooth and every diagnosis made, along with X-rays and operations. He's going to look at this from an economic perspective as well to see if, by using this accumulated data, we can predict which patients we will need to see and when. Dental care is free for everybody under 18 in Norway, so we have a lot of data. He will discuss using the data to better understand which children are going to get cavities and when. That can help in making funding and policy decisions, and to improve the quality of care. But dental care can also overlap with other types of healthcare; for example, dentists often identify a number of medical conditions whose symptoms appear in the mouth (such as oral cancer), and it’s hard for general practitioners to catch that since they don’t usually look in your mouth. He will also discuss the importance of being able to share data safely between general healthcare and dental care, because those two domains are separate in Norway. Additionally, he will discuss using artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical terminology to better understand if there are any indicators dentists can use to detect in advance potential health events such as heart attacks, so it’s a look at the bigger picture, and the socio-economical benefits that can be realized from structuring that dental data.
Q: Standardized care plans in nursing are a presentation topic at many SNOMED CT events. What will this session focus on?
A: The speaker will present a dashboard where the health region can track the use of nursing terminology in their electronic patient record. They can see which nursing care plans are used where, and which concepts are most used from the different plans. They can also follow the nursing diagnosis, interventions and outcomes when the patient is transferred to a new ward. The data shown in the dashboard is in real-time, and can be used for quality work both in the wards and in the development or maintenance of nursing care plans.
Q: What can you tell us about the cancer registry session?
A: The cancer screening program in Norway is for intestinal, breast and cervical cancer. All the screenings (tests), including those done outside the screening program, are performed in hospitals, except cervical cancer screening, and the results need to be reported to the registries. In this session, the speakers will share how they went from using unstructured forms to using SNOMED CT to submit information to the national registries. One of the registries uses FHIR for automatic data capture where the content of the forms suggested is based on the information in the Electronic Health Record (EHR). This reduces double registration for doctors and serves to quality assure the content. Now the EHR generates a report that the doctor can approve, and it's then submitted directly to the registry, so that's a very concrete way of making the workday more efficient for health professionals.
Q: What are the three most important takeaways you hope attendees will leave with?
A: There are about 29,000 doctors, 109,000 nurses and another 40,000 or so other health professionals such as physiotherapists and nutritionists in Norway, and they need a terminology to document the care they are providing. There are a variety of perspectives across these different professionals on the value of using a clinical terminology – positive, negative and indifferent. So the first is showing to a local audience the diversity of SNOMED CT – who is using it and how. The second is understanding how these local initiatives fit into or align with international initiatives – how we contribute to them and what we do. Third, I hope that people will make connections with other people who may be having the same kind of problems, or maybe they can even share solutions they have found. People can be very separated or isolated and working on their own things, so maybe this will broaden their horizons.
For more information on SNOMED CT in Norway, visit the SNOMED International website and view the event program.